1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to wired and wireless communications and, more particularly, to accessing shared media, services and resources by grouped member devices.
2. Related Art
In today's world of rapidly changing devices that instantly add tools that become a significant part of everyday life, the Internet has served as a backbone for coupling networks of all types include cellular and wireless local area networks as well as wired networks to create opportunity for the continual advancement of feature based devices. As different devices are developed to operate using these networks, popular features are often limited to the particular devices. Thus, devices are often application specific having application related data formats and associated interfaces that are incompatible. Accordingly, specific functionality corresponds to specific hardware platforms that support specific protocols and interfaces.
Many communication systems, nonetheless, support wireless and wire lined communications between wireless and/or wire lined communication devices to expand global communications. Such communication systems range from national and/or international cellular telephone systems to the Internet to point-to-point in-home wireless networks.
Each type of communication system is constructed to operate to be compatible with one or more communication standards. For instance, wireless communication systems may operate in accordance with one or more standards, including, but not limited to, IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth, advanced mobile phone services (AMPS), digital AMPS, global system for mobile communications (GSM), code division multiple access (CDMA), local multi-point distribution systems (LMDS), multi-channel-multi-point distribution systems (MMDS), and/or variations thereof.
Depending on the type of wireless communication system, a wireless communication device, such as a cellular telephone, two-way radio, personal digital assistant (PDA), personal computer (PC), laptop computer, home entertainment equipment, etc., communicates directly or indirectly with other wireless communication devices. For direct communications (also known as point-to-point communications), the participating wireless communication devices tune their receivers and transmitters to the same channel or channels (e.g., one of a plurality of radio frequency (RF) carriers of the wireless communication system) and communicate over that channel(s).
For indirect wireless communications, each wireless communication device communicates directly with an associated base station (e.g., for cellular services) and/or an associated access point (e.g., for an in-home or in-building wireless network) via an assigned channel. To complete a communication connection between the wireless communication devices, the associated base stations and/or associated access points communicate with each other directly, via a system controller, via a public switch telephone network (PSTN), via the Internet, and/or via some other wide area network.
Each wireless communication device includes a built-in radio transceiver (i.e., receiver and transmitter) or is connected to a radio transceiver (e.g., a station for in-home and/or in-building wireless communication networks, RF modem, etc.). The various circuit blocks of a radio transceiver jointly operate to support communications and associated functionality according to the type of communication system(s) it supports.
The Internet has thus vastly expanded capabilities and services that may be provided to the user. For example, users can now download media, including streaming media on demand. Other network based services are also now available based on the connectivity that is possible due to the integration and cross platform coupling that the Internet has made possible.